If the sky is an immense canvas, then Georgia O’Keeffe’s artworks are its flying colors. Titled the first woman to participate in the early modernist movements, O’Keeffe achieved quick and significant success, forging the way for successive generations of artists due to her artwork’s engagement with abstraction and a spiritual sensibility. To celebrate this fascinating chronology of the artist’s compositions for the first time in Spain, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza researched her five paintings to get an enlarged view of her technique, and the research spilled mesmerizing secrets.
Georgia O’Keeffe was one of the most significant painters of 20th-century America. Quite famous for her close-up paintings of flowers and near-abstract Mexican landscapes, O’Keeffe was first titled ‘the queen of the art studio’ in the Chatham Episcopal Institute for her excellent drawing skills. One of the teachers who impressed O’Keeffe the most was the artist William Merritt Chase, whose dark-light contrasts and thick and swift brushstrokes in warm and vivid colors perfected the genre of creating lively pictures. As the artist found her own way of painting, her artworks looked pure, fine, and sincere, which hadn’t entered into American art for a long time.
Never before did O’Keeffe’s artworks reach Spain for which Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza must be well admired. The museum not only portrayed her works in an exhibition but also carried out research on her works dated between 1921 and 1957 to primarily analyze the materials of her works to reconstruct her creative process. Another objective of this study was to detect the possible alterations in her works to compare the results with the line of research begun by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The result of this study confirmed that
“O’Keeffe successfully reconciled her artistic expression with a painstaking technique for preserving the appearance of her works over time.”
The research took five of her paintings to examine, which were, White Iris No. 7, New York Street with Moon, Shell, and Old Shingle V, From the Plains II, and Blind I.
Starting from the elementary technique, the artist always started painting with preliminary drawings during her formative period and sketches from her life and later-used photographs to develop the works in her studio. Using pencil or charcoal, she drew fine lines on the canvas before she applied paint and this usually matched the lines of her final composition, as per its visibility through photomacrography and infrared reflectography.
After sketching, when she applied color, she worked with different hues, degrees of saturation, gloss, transparency, and texture. Majorly working in the rich palette of colors, O’Keeffe usually combined two or three to achieve a particular tone, while employing lead white as the base pigment. In White Iris No. 7, she used three different types of whites- lead, zinc, and titanium which were only identifiable under ultraviolet light.
Furthermore, it is a must to note that the artist sorted hundreds of color cards composed of her own which provided significant aids to achieve the desired hue and value. Placing these catalogs beneath the glass-sheet palette so that she could mix colors appropriately, she intermixed the oil paints in the palette to achieve a homogeneous tone, leaving the canvas weave visible. The optical microscope image of the sample taken from the artwork shows a homogeneousness of the paint mixture and sharply defined layers. This further stated that she always allowed a previous application to dry to prevent the tones from blending, a technique called wet-into-dry.
When it comes to protecting her paintings, she herself made industrial-grade cardboard and cut out half-moon-shaped finger grooves to give them a backing board.
O’Keeffe was an excellent American artist who gave much thought to even the protection of her paintings. Testing for different materials and methods, her drawing and coloring varied due to her change of styles in her artworks. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza did spill a few secrets from her gallery, which might be helpful to the existing and next generations of artists.
Resources.
- Thyssen-Bornemisza Museo Nacional.
- Featured Image: Georgia O’Keeffe, a Photograph; Alfred Stieglitz, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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